January 12, 2006
Life in Hell—An Honest Portrait Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 10:15 AM EST I have just read an astonishing book. It’s a 34-year-old woman’s true account of life in Berlin from April 20, 1945, when Soviet troops are fast approaching from the east for the final battle for the city, through June 22, when the first glimmerings of life begun again are dawning. In between are days spent hiding in crowded, dark basements with no news of what’s going on outside; fighting in the streets; the suicide of Hitler; the city reduced nearly to rubble and the end of the last vestiges of civic order; the arrival of the victors raging for plunder and rapine; and struggle for survival in the starkest terms. A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City—A Diary, by Anonymous (Metropolitan Books, $23), was published in Germany in 1959, attacked for “besmirching the honor of German women,” mostly forgotten, and never published in full in English until last year, after the author’s death. She wrote it to keep her sanity, and she did so by looking her harrowing situation straight in the eye; her lack of sentimentality and self-pity is astounding. At one point, after having been raped numerous times in the first few days of Soviet conquest, she decides she must “find a single wolf to keep away the pack.” I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in the most awful effects of war, or to put it another way, in the real depths of human nature—which means just about anyone at all. As the British historian Anthony Beevor writes in his introduction, “This is a victim’s eye view, a woman’s perspective of a terrifying onslaught on a civilian population, yet her account is characterized by its courage, its stunning intellectual honesty, and its uncommon powers of observation and perception. It is one of the most important personal accounts ever written about the effects of war and defeat. It is also one of the most revealing pieces of social history imaginable.”
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